Symbols

What separates humans from non-humans? What makes someone more happy than another in comparison?

I was wondering about these two questions recently, and while reading Crime and Punishment as well as reflections upon my sordid life, have come to the conclusion that the key concept that answers these two questions is that of symbology. Or, based on Jungian psychology, the equivalent notion of archetypes.

Allow me to expand upon this a little more. We have known from machine learning and artificial intelligence research that it is possible to identify patterns from data as a form of knowledge. We use these patterns in a very mechanistic way to achieve rudimentary intelligence that helps us with many (but not all) types of knowledge-based work, like search engines or even for information extraction. However, we hardly ever call these programs (with the learnt patterns) as being truly intelligent for the simple reason that they do not associate any form of higher understanding of the patterns learnt. And no, I am not referring to a higher logic-type generalisation of the patterns that some of the newer algorithms can do (taking predicates and generalising them under a universal or existential quantifier). I mean the assignment and use of symbols to the learnt patterns.

When we observe a pattern, we do not see it for its mechanistic properties. From chunking, we parse the world as a set or sequence of symbols interconnected either through spatial relationships or through a series of symboli relationships. Much of the work that attempts to make machine learning rules explainable attempt to code such symbols, but there are always the issue of vagueness associated with each symbol---machines hate vagueness and therefore have a tendency to fail. Deep learning architectures attempt to simulate such vagueness by increasing the amount of expressitivity of the domain in the hopes that that expressitivity is sufficient to capture the blur edges that bound each symbol.

So thinking in symbols is what separates a human from a non-human. But this doesn't quite answer the second posed question, i.e. what makes someone more happy than another in comparison.

I posit that the answer lies again with symbols, or specifically, the level of symbology that a person is willing to observe the world with. There are those of us who observe the world as a mechanism which has cause and effect, and attempt to make sense of the mechanism in a reductionist manner. Under such an interpretation, we have a tendency of making observations that are for the most part objective---we describe what we see and only what we see, and assign no other meaning to it other than what we saw as the cause and what was the corresponding effect.

Those of us who observe the world that way have a tendency to be less happy. There is no other meaning to us about the world other than how it works, and many times, the how in which the world works can be very depressing simply because of the way it is. For instance, realising that many people have to sacrifice their time and health to build the buildings that we live in, to plant the food we eat, to process the food we want into forms that allow ease of long term storage, will make living appear to be extremely precarious, a reality that most do not see since they tend to abstract away such details in a symbolic context---food is available from the supermarkets, buildings are built over time by man and machine, and energy is easily available whenever they want it.

There is also a slightly more obvious and less contrived example: religion. Any school of thought that runs almost completely on symbolism can be reliably classified as a religion. Abstract concepts of salvation, life, death and even sin are codified into a set of symbols coherent under a specific religious interpretation. Ritualised actions are also another manifestation of symbolism---they allow the human to connect with the abstract concepts with a set of physical actions that, under a reductionist empirical perspective, mean absolutely nothing in terms of cause and effect (magical thinking). It may seem silly to those of us who have no strong affiliation with any religion, but those who perform the ritualised actions gain a peace of mind that those who are areligious do not get easily.

That's about all I want to yammer about really. I'm lazy, I'm tired, I'm disillusioned, and I realised I needed to write an entry here. Till the next sordid affair, I suppose.